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The Immigration Bill: privatising the police state

As John says, there was never any chance of the Tories being the doyens of civil liberties. Carrying an ID card or being locked up for 42 days is bad enough, but at least Labour weren’t asking Serco or your landlord to do it.

Today’s immigration bill (the eight in 18 years incidentally, it takes a lot of legislative effort to be a soft touch), will make it harder for immigrants to set up home in the UK. Of course, since you can’t actually recognise an immigrant instantly it will make it harder for everyone to set up home in the UK (if you can afford a home, that is).

The Bill empowers jobsworths to check driving licence applicants for immigration status. That means more wasted times for all motorists. The Tories also want to clamp down on “sham” marriages or civil partnership (gays too!). That’s means more forms to fill out for everyone getting married. They’ll also require banks to check against a database of known immigration offenders before opening bank accounts. Want to know the false positive rate? Well think about how often your bank fucks up….Yep.

The Bill will push us ever so slightly further towards a police state. Combined with the new police powers to detain strange looking menpotential sex offenders we are heading towards a system where private citizens and companies will be asking you for your papers and the police can control your life for a lot longer than 42 days.

The onslaught against immigration is not only a backdoor to a more generalised oppression. It also forms a vital pillar of the Tories economic policy to fuck up all the countries industries which are not housing and high finance, The suppression of migrants has had an awful impact on universities. Foreign students generate export income, help subsidise UK ones and support our university’s status as international centres of research excellence. Way to go guys!

You all know I care about immigrants, I haven’t even come to how these measures will impact them yet. Surprise! It’s going to affect them badly. I’ll come to them later. At the moment just enjoy the prospect of being asked for your papers so more people can die at our borders.

And this immigration bill really is contemptible. Politics is often a question of signalling and what this bill signals, alas, is that the government prefers the presumption of guilt to the presumption of innocence. It is a bill that turns ordinary Britons into snitches for central government. A bill that will make life more inconvenient for millions of residents while, almost certainly, achieving few, if any of its aims. A bill, most of all, that sends a message that the United Kingdom is a bitter, paranoid, timorous, small-minded kind of country. The kind of country ruled by the kinds of people who spend their days leaving comments on newspaper websites.